Free Belinda's Rings by Corinna Chong Page A

Unorthodox wind vortices couldn’t explain how the grains of one stem bed had been bent at different heights to create defined layers like trifle, or how these layers could be swept in opposite directions. But crop circle theories fell by the wayside as soon as those two opportunists from Southampton insisted they had masterminded the phenomenon. They claimed to have dragged a plank attached to a rope to flatten the grains. Belinda was certain this was just a ploy to gain attention and notoriety. The manmade crop circles could be picked out on first glance by even the least discerning eye; they were crooked and lopsided, the lines wavered, and the flattened grains were smattered about the ground like road kill. They were a joke compared to the true circles, in which the stalks were bent at near ninety-degree angles and brushed like hair into perfectly symmetrical forms. The stalks were not flattened, but hovered inches above the ground. Their seeded heads had been swept into neat parcels of cresting waves. No evidence of footpaths leading into or out of the field. And besides, there were simply too many occurrences — more than one hundred each year in England alone, and dozens more across the globe — to be attributed solely to the work of two silly pranksters.
    For Belinda, the most fascinating evidence came from Marshall V. Longfellow’s article on the anatomical anomalies found in grains taken from crop circles. She was finally sitting on the train, nearly on her way to meet the man himself. She had a copy of Dr. Longfellow’s seminal article with her, which she’d already decorated with highlights and penciled notes. She’d practically memorized it, but she took it out of her purse and looked over her notes again, as a distraction. She’d been chewing her nails incessantly as she waited for the train to start on its way. For a moment, she wondered what Wiley and her children might be doing, if they were sitting at the breakfast table, eating the toaster strudels she’d bought on Sebastian’s request. But then she realized it was two in the morning where they were. Everyone would be in bed. She quickly turned her eyes back to her article, back to Dr. Longfellow’s inspiring words.
    He was an American biophysicist, and a legend in crop-circle research. He had been the first researcher to take samples and analyze their molecular structure, and he found that the plant cells had in fact been altered at the site of bending. The results of his tests suggested that the grains had been manipulated by microwaves, heated at the nodes and flexed into shape in the same way a piece of glass can be rendered malleable under flame. Some of the stalks even showed evidence of singeing. When the bent nodes were dissected and examined under microscope, they appeared to have burst from the inside out. A series of concentric circles radiated from the centre of each ruptured node, branded into the plant cells like minuscule tree rings.
    Belinda couldn’t fathom why the skeptics had largely dismissed Longfellow’s findings. She guessed fear. It was evident, at any rate, that the grains had suffered some sort of trauma, and yet Belinda preferred not to think of it this way. She’d seen photos of one crop circle in a field of flowering canola, where each delicate yellow petal remained intact and untouched. The formation looked like a giant Easter wreath dotted with thousands of flowers, all nesting gently among the combed stems as if tucked into place by an invisible hand. If the incident had been traumatic, surely the canola flowers would have died. Surely the grains wouldn’t have continued to grow in their horizontal positions without making any attempt to regain their vertical posture. But they accepted their alteration willingly, continued to live, and even to ripen. Belinda saw it as a testament to the beauty of adaptation.
    When Belinda was a child and still living in her